The Year of Jubilo Read online

  “See here, sir—are you pissing in the road?”

  The voice startled Gawain so badly that he almost dived into the roadside weeds, but he caught himself just in time and pressed on manfully, trying to finish—it seemed to take forever—until at last he could button up his breeches and turn. He looked up and made out the shape of a horse and rider shrouded in the white rain. He was about to comment when a bolt of lightning struck a tree in John Walker’s yard; the report, sharp and concussive as a howitzer, made Gawain duck, and in the brilliant flash he saw the horse rear on its hind legs, saw the rider in his Federal officer’s coat and sword and broad hat, heard him curse as he fought his mount.

  “Dammit, sir, make way!” said the officer, and clapped his spurs hard into the horse’s flanks and sent him leaping forward over Gawain’s carpet bag and up the road.

  “Good God,” said Gawain Harper, and took up his bag and began to walk toward town. He was done with running; whatever was happening up ahead would have to wait until he got there. It occurred to him as he walked along that when he left Cumberland three years ago, he had gone north on the cars. Now he was coming from the south. A full circle, then, and enough walking to have circumnavigated the globe. Suddenly a light burst in him, like the fire from the lightning-struck tree: he was alive, and up yonder was Morgan and Aunt Vassar and his old mad Papa. And freedom, too, whatever that meant. He didn’t know for sure, couldn’t know—except that it had to do with being alive. He thought of the little fyce, sleeping on the banks of Leaf River, and of his cousin, and Sir Niles, and young Fitter—and he might have thought of all the rest who were gone in the smoke, might have seen their faces one by one and heard the echo of their voices down the long corridor of time if he’d wanted to. Perhaps he would want to someday, but not this day. He could put off grieving for a little while. Let the summer rain grieve for now, and the sighing trees, and the earth over which they’d all passed their little while. He was alive, and he would live to claim the long days left him. Whether he deserved them or not, he could not say. He only knew that they were his, and he would do his best by them.

  Gawain Harper lifted his face to the rain again. “Oh, me,” he said to his God, who dwelt up there beyond the thunder and the clouds. “You make sure I do all right, won’t you?”

  For answer, he had the rain. It was enough.

  PART 2

  Long Remember

  VII

  In June 1865, the only jail in Cumberland County was a United States Military Railroad boxcar set out on the old house track behind the ashes of the depot. It had been there long enough for the wheels and the strap rails beneath them to rust, and for weeds to flourish around it, and for a gang of sparrows to build nests under the roof-walk. Over the winter and spring, the car had hosted a variety of inhabitants whose only amenities had been a smoky Sibley stove, a collection of vermin-ridden blankets, and a bucket for waste. The provost, Lieutenant Rolf von Arnim, was not much disposed to extravagance regarding the jail and its tenants.

  Only one inmate could be said to be permanent, and then only because he refused to leave. This was a man known as Old Hundred-and-Eleven, so called because years of chewing tobacco had left three indelible streaks on his chin, one from each corner of his mouth and one down the middle, startling in their clarity because Old Hundred-and-Eleven was a beardless albino. His long hair was linen-white and tangled. He wore greasy leather breeches and a ragged frock coat. He had been barefoot since birth; his knobbed and horny feet were so tough that he could dance on the red-hot stove, or so it was told by some who claimed to have seen it. His only possessions were an umbrella and an enormous illustrated Bible that he had worn to tatters, that leaked pages covered with his penciled annotations.

  Harry Stribling had not heard the story about dancing on the stove, nor did he know that Old Hundred-and-Eleven was originally jailed for assaulting a chaplain. He did know that the man, like some grotesque Bartleby, refused to leave the jail—though he went foraging now and then, and made himself useful to von Arnim as a swamper and a digger of graves. Stribling also knew that Old Hundred-and-Eleven was by far the most peculiar human being he had ever seen, and so a proper study for the philosopher.

  Stribling had been brought to the boxcar jail after the affair at the tavern, in company with the other civilian participants who were even now sleeping in a pile at one end of the car: a big, bearded man named Nobles, a one-legged former artilleryman named Marcus Peck, and a wiry, nervous little fellow who introduced himself as S. Cragin Knox. They were all Confederate veterans, but the fight (Stribling learned to his disgust) had not been a matter of national loyalties. It was simply the old, tired contention of one branch of service with another. The trouble began when Peck declared that the artillery was the supreme arbiter of battle, that the infantry was superfluous on the modern field of war, that in fact the infantry had lost the war for the Confederacy just as it had for the British in the Revolution. These and other arguments inspired Knox and Nobles to comment that Saint Barbara, the patroness of gunners, was a rapid old whore whose privates could accommodate gun and limber and horses too, a thing they would not have said had they been sober. But they were not sober. In fact, none of the patrons of the Citadel of Djibouti in that early afternoon was sober—not the former rebels, nor the Federal infantrymen, nor the Federal gunners from the regular battery. All joined in the fray, but only the civilians had been clapped in jail. The troops were remanded to Lieutenant von Arnim, who set them to marching around and around the square with barrels over their heads as an act of contrition.

  Had he known the true origins of the affair, Harry Stribling might not have ridden in so eagerly. As it was, he had a blackening eye, a broken knuckle on his right hand, and the memory of an unusual fight. The downpour had been a novel twist, but the thing that made the incident so memorable was the arrival of the irate Federal Colonel who finally brought things to a halt by firing his pistol in the air.

  Gawain Harper had arrived last, his wet straw hat hanging down around his face like an umbrella. By that time, Stribling was sitting in the mud with the other lads, the sergeant of the guard watching over them.

  “Why, Harry, what have you done?” asked Gawain.

  “You know this fellow?” asked the sergeant. He was leaning on his musket and smoking a curious pipe—Gawain wished he could get a closer look at it.

  “I should say so,” said Gawain. “This is Harry Stribling, the well-known bushwhacker.”

  The sergeant removed his pipe and spit. “He just told me he was Gawain Harper, the well-known scholar.”

  “Well, good God,” said Gawain.

  Stribling shrugged.

  “You best go away,” the sergeant told Gawain, “’fore I haul you off with the rest.”

  “All right,” said Gawain. “Can I tell the prisoner somethin?”

  The sergeant nodded, and Gawain knelt beside his comrade. “Now, Harry,” said Gawain, “when they turn you loose, if they ever do, you hunt up my house. It’s up on the Holly Springs road, just where the road bends. I am fixin to go there straightway.”

  “You ain’t goin to see Miss Morgan?”

  “I look like a drowned muskrat,” said Gawain. “I am not fit to call on anybody. Besides—” He stopped, and looked away.

  “Besides what?” asked Stribling.

  “Nothin,” said Gawain. He rose stiffly to his feet and turned to the sergeant. “He ain’t really a bushwhacker,” he told the sergeant. “He is just a little peculiar in the head, from a fall, you understand.”

  The sergeant nodded sympathetically. “A good night’s rest will do him wonders,” he said.

  “I will come see about you, Harry,” said Gawain.

  Stribling lifted his arm and watched Gawain Harper slog away with his carpet bag, pulling hard against the mud.

  Now Stribling sat swinging his legs from the open door of the boxcar. There were no bars, no grate, nothing at all to keep him from leaving, though he’d been told not to,
and figured he better not. At least, not before dark. Stribling pulled his watch. A few hours to go before suppertime—might as well wait for some rations.

  He raised his eyes to the fresh afternoon that still smelled of rain, to the mist that rose from the grass, to the sky empty of clouds now. His gaze roved over the green woods that lay beyond the railroad, and the deep shadows there. A bored sentry paced nearby, and there was old Zeke, tethered to a fence post, sleeping with his off hind foot cocked.

  Then the boxcar creaked with movement, and Stribling smelled sweat and rancid ham fat, and Old Hundred-and-Eleven eased into the door beside him. The man grinned at Stribling, his eyes like a pair of pale rubies. “That was a good shower, warn’t it?” he said.

  Stribling nodded; The man waved his arm, his long finger (the nail yellow and hooked like a dog’s) pointing to the afternoon. “Cleans it all up, y’see? Makes it all new again, same as the first mornin old Adam woke, when he still had all his ribs. Rah!” The man’s voice was strangely musical. He edged closer to Stribling, laid a hand on his leg. “D’ye think they’ll hang ye?” he asked. “Them yankees?”

  Stribling’s flesh crawled from the touch of the man. “No, sir,” he said. “I do not believe they will.”

  The man seemed disappointed. He removed his hand from Stribling’s leg. “Well, they ort to,” he said. “No offense, I’m sure.”

  “Oh, no,” said Stribling. “However, I think they intend to dangle you.” Old Hundred-and-Eleven pulled back in surprise, his mouth a perfect O, his eyes wide. “Ye don’t say! Hang me?”

  “Yep,” said Stribling.

  “Rah!” huffed the other. “Arrah! Bavardage!”

  “You may think so, but even now they are buildin the gallows down on Leaf River. On inquiry, they told me it was for ‘the pale man that spoke in tongues.’ Them was their words, not mine. ‘You mean Old Hundred-and-Eleven?’ says I. ‘The same,’ they said. So there you have it.”

  “Ye must be mistaken, sir,” said the old man. He waved his hands, his voice quivering now. “I am a fixture, well respected in these parts. I am the personal friend of Gin’ral von Arnim; he told me hisself I could stay long as I wanted, never mentioned any hangin.”

  Stribling smiled and shook his head. He leaned close to the man, lowered his voice. “I heard em talkin. They taken you for a prophet.”

  “Hell, lama prophet!” shouted the old man. “God damn, I been slingin prophecies sixty-eight year! Why, hell, I prophesized all these war and tumults—t’warn’t any news to me. And freein these niggers? Why, I knowed about that ’fore they ever was any Year of Jubilo. Don’t tell me about prophesizin!” The old man slapped his hands on his knees and began to rock back and forth. “The Lord God Jehovah!” he said. “The twelve tribes of Isr’el!”

  “Calm yourself,” said Stribling. “They’s one person I know can help you.”

  The old man clamped his hand on Stribling’s arm. “Who is it? But speak the name, and I’ll plumb the levels of perdition to fetch him.”

  Stribling thought a moment, rubbing his brow. “If I tell you, then you must promise to fetch em here.”

  “If they’s in Californy, I’ll fetch em. I seen a feller hanged once—it ain’t for me.”

  Stribling drew a deep breath, leaned over and whispered a name in the man’s ear. Old Hundred-and-Eleven started in surprise again. “Say it ain’t so!”

  Stribling nodded.

  Old Hundred-and-Eleven pulled Stribling close and kissed him noisily on the cheek. “I’m gone for town,” he said, and dropped out of the boxcar door and began to shamble off, his ragged coattails flapping behind him. The sentry glanced his way. “Go it, Ol’ Hundred-and-’leven!” said the man, and laughed.

  Stribling did not laugh. He took a handkerchief out of his coat pocket and scrubbed his cheek.

  GAWAIN HARPER STOOD on the front porch of the house he was born in. His eyes were fastened on the peeling paint of the front door, but it was not the door he saw. Rather, he saw the whole moment in which he stood, as if it were a bright globe and he turning in the center of it. He was surprised to discover that all his expectations, all the fanciful images he had dreamed of over the years, deserted him now, and in their place was the brief, ordinary passage of a summer afternoon.

  The house was clapboard, two-story, with an ell that had been added just before the war. It had been painted white once, but was peeling so badly that the gray of the pine weatherboards was the dominant color now. The shutters were open, save for a few that had swung partly closed on their hinges. The broad gallery on which he stood was crowded on one end with rocking chairs, like old women huddled in gossip; the other end was empty, for there the porch had given way. Someone had propped a broomstick in the hole for warning.

  A few of the trees that once had shaded the house were gone, but enough remained to dapple all with light and shadow, and to fill the air with the smell of their damp leaves. The tangle of sweet-shrub by the porch still thrived, and the crepe myrtle, and the rife lantana Aunt Vassar always planted in the spring, and the fleshy cannas that Gawain, when a child, had always been fearful of. He never knew why, even then. The old wood of the house was warm and gave of a warm smell; the afternoon was quiet, the air a little cooler after the storm. In the grass, in the gnarly privet along the western line, in the solemn trees, the old summer voices buzzed and whispered, and the birds sang, thankful for the rain. Gawain heard the drip-drip-drip of water in a gutter pipe, the creak of a limb, the flutter of a sparrow in the eaves. It was all so homely, so ordinary and so beautiful, and Gawain understood that these things would be the same whether he was standing here or not. The afternoon was passing, the sun falling and so changing the slant of light, the minutes disappearing one by one down the long corridor of time, and Gawain himself already disappearing with them.

  No, he thought. No, it has to change a little for my being here. He held up his hands, saw them against the door, made himself believe that he had shifted the universe just by stepping up on the porch. The moment took its shape, its texture, from him now. Were he not here, it would all be different, might not exist at all.

  He dropped his hands. For a moment longer he stood watching, suddenly aware that he was balanced on the thin edge of time between one moment and another, between one life and another. The thought hung in his mind and left him immobile. He wondered how long he could sustain these last seconds of the war; he found in his tired heart, just for an instant, the smallest glimmer of regret that it was over and something else about to begin. What it was he couldn’t imagine, wasn’t even supposed to imagine now; he only knew that every breath brought him closer. He swallowed hard, and took off his hat, and lifted his hand to knock.

  The door opened before he touched it; he stopped with his fist poised in the air, and the globe of time rushed inward until it was a single brilliant point of light, and again he was in the center of it, though all he could hear now was the drum of blood in his ears. “Oh,” he said, “well,” and dropped his hand.

  “It’s about time you got here,” Aunt Vassar said. “Mind that hole in the porch.”

  NOTHING ELSE IN the world was so interesting to young Alex Rhea as the weather. Worms were good—the yard was full of them now, and he poked and prodded them and gathered them in clumps. Ants had their charm, and birds’ nests, and the dark, mysterious things he believed dwelt in the upper rooms of old Mister Carter’s house. But nothing held his attention like the weather, that garment that the world changed at will—violent and sweet and illogical, but always present, always inescapable.

  He had loved the passage of the storm, though it scared him some, too. He’d watched from the safety of the enormous bed in which his sister slept, peering out from a part in the curtains at the tall windows of the upper bedroom. Framed in the window light was the glorious rain, dropping straight down and heavy at first, then slanting in the gusts and hammering at the windowpanes until he feared they would break, and the wind howling and thrashing among th
e oaks, and the thunder drumming, and how the lightning did crack and flicker against the rattling glass. Then a moment when it all turned, and the rain settled into a steady percussion, going gentler and gentler, and the thunder murmuring farther away, and the lightning seemed to be looking back over its shoulder as it passed eastward—and then the sun. Inexplicably, as if it had never left at all, the sun spread itself over the dripping trees and the silver-puddled yard, bringing steam from the grass and lighting the birds that shivered their feathers in the branches. He could go out then, and breathe the electric air, and ponder the worms that writhed in the sweet sunlight, and still, way off beyond the eastern hills, the thunder grumbled, reluctant to leave but leaving anyhow because God said it had to. Alex wondered if everybody had weather. If the yankees had it.

  The boy was down by the road, studying the wiggletails in the ditch water, when Old Hundred-and-Eleven appeared. The man had his breeches rolled up and was lifting his feet high, like a crane. His feet made a squelching sound in the mud. Alex watched him nervously; he was never sure about this ghostly fellow with his pink eyes. “Hey, Mister Eleven,” he said.

  “Lord God Jehovah,” said the old man. He was breathing hard, and the sweat was streaming down his face. “Ere Miss Morgan to home, pray? Please say she is.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the boy. “She is yonder in the back yard, lookin for the cat. He run off yesterday. She won’t find him, though. You can’t hardly—”

  “Rah!” said the old man. “Never mind the cat, no offense. Will ye go and fetch her? She must save me from a cruel fate undeserved. Say you will.”

  “Why, surely,” said the boy, and turned and ran for the back yard.